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Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

kotaku.com

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Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#291

Post by Sebb767 »

jerf wrote: post #159

Why should the apps have to pay? Why can't reddit provide a paid version that allows you to access the APIs, which the external apps can then use? You already have to log in to them anyhow so it's not like you'd need an extra API key or anything. $20/year is probably an order of magnitude more then they make on ads served to me. The weirdest thing about the ad economy to me isn't that it exists, but as I've banged on…

> I'm willing to outbid them by an order of magnitude easily. If even 1% of the user base follows along that's a lot of money.

They already have monetization in the form of Reddit Gold and awards. You can pay for premium right now. Also, people are _really_ reluctant to pay for services they get for free; take a look at the recent thread about YouTube ads [0] and the lengths some people go to in order to justify watching the content for free (while blocking ads, no less).

I don't necessarily disagree with your take, but I'm pretty sure you're overestimating how much people are willing to pay Reddit directly.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35892512

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#292

Post by jarfil »

p3rls wrote: post #133
lawn wrote: post #17

I don't understand how a popular product like Reddit has so atrociously bad UI. The site itself is just garbage and the difference between the redesign and old.reddit is just so jarring, and the Android client is also garbage. Are there people who even thinks these designs are good? How do you even end up with something like this? Is it just garbage requirements thrown out by clueless managers? There must be some for…

What apps do you think do UI well that you would hold up as a counterpoint here? Just curious

"Relay for reddit" offers a good experience: removes header and footer on scrolling, shows a list of post titles with previews, hides all actions behind a finger flick, with less used ones in expandable menus.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#293

Post by spacemadness »

rchaud wrote: post #268
waboremo wrote: post #220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Astroturfing is the least of the problems; most threads are filled with fake experts (of a very specific demographic - usually very young, american, male, etc) projecting. This is fine if you consciously remember this while browsing, but when you start to believe that you can get a pulse from "real people" on Reddit, you've already lost the game. Remember: to even post a comment on Reddit already puts you in a niche…

It's a good thing we don't have any of this foolishness on Hacker News! /s

We have plenty of diversity here. We have young, American, and male folks for instance. Even web developers if you need more diversity than that.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#294

Post by distances »

sorenjan wrote: post #213
distances wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm also interested. I'm still using Materialistic, but it's not even in the Play Store any more so I would like to find something maintained.

I recently switched from Materialistic to Harmonic, and I like it. https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.simon.harm...

Thanks for the hint, I'll try it out!

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#295

Post by [deleted] »

interestica wrote: post #261

The curious thing is that Reddit is as valuable as it is because of what it gets from its users (free moderation, free user-submitted content.) There's always been a sort of implicit agreement that it's a symbiotic relationship -- reddit provides the house/utilities, users provide the stuff, and mods do the clean up. Third-party devs were an extension of that -- making it easier to connect the parties.

[deleted]

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#296

Post by feoren »

wingerlang wrote: post #250
frozenlettuce wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's on purpose. The new UI places each post inside a "card". The intent is having you scroll past cards. This makes even text-only posts be similar to image ads posts, and while you scroll you are not aware if the next card is an ad or not. Layouts with heavy information density (as old.reddit.com) are more user friendly, as you they allow you to just scan the list and be done with it. But are bad for ads.

There is a compact mode on the new design since day one, even the classic mode doesn't have the "card" design. This is never mentioned by people who complain (you included). In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9). It has less because the "promoted" has a larger button, one could even argue this makes them stand out more than on old reddit. I would agree that the…

> In compact mode, they (new/old) have a similar number of posts on the screen (old: 11, new: 9)

Old reddit has 25 posts per page and my screen can fit 14 vertically at once.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#297

Post by holler »

tremere wrote: post #8

Reddit is past its expiration date anyway and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site. Perhaps this was due to Reddit's friendliness toward programmatic access but it seems they are taking that away. This is a good opportunity to create a new community, and essentially take back messaging from the corporations (let's be real about what reddit is) and put it back into the hands of the people.

> and I'm surprised no one has created a challenger site.

Have been building an alternative at https://sqwok.im, the twist is that it uses realtime chat instead of comments, and no voting currently.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#298

Post by PenguinCoder »

xvilka wrote: post #43

Despite my doubts about Mastodon being able to become popular Twitter alternative, I wish there was the same wave of migrating to the Fediverse-based open source Reddit alternative. So far I don't see them very popular.

There's been a small migration happening that I see on Lemmy instance https://beehaw.org

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#299

Post by Pxtl »

slantaclaus wrote: post #241
llampx wrote: post #10

Every social network goes through this. You used to be able to access Facebook via other front-ends as well, same with Twitter. This will cut down drastically on my reddit usage, and for that I am thankful. I don't have the Facebook or Twitter apps on my phone, and only use them from Firefox in Private mode when I do get the urge to check them.

Reddit has become toxic. Deleting the app off my phone has really helped with my emotional health

I have trouble remembering a time when it wasn't.

Re: Third-party Reddit apps are being crushed by price increases

#300

Post by azangru »

JohnFen wrote: post #284
azangru wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There must be some force here, because Twitter's UI is also garbage. It's called modern frontend, I'm afraid :-) By the way the next iteration of Reddit web UI, which this time is based on web components with Lit rather than on React, is less garbage — at least in terms of raw performance. Design-wise it may still be horrible; but at least technologically, it feels like a definite improvement. You can check it out…

Raw performance is generally one of the least important things in a website, at least for me.

I thought so too; but then I discovered that I was seeing seconds-long interaction delay on my old laptop after scrolling down the feed a bit. The performance profile I recorded in dev tools then looked like this:

https://i.imgur.com/OSfzPDa.png

That was when I fully appreciated both that raw performance is important for me, and how truly horrible it was on the Reddit site.

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